I'm building his Super-PC with 3 x RAID-5 SATA 800GB drives, 1 x SATA 800GB separate drive to drop Acronis.IMG files to and a cold 'spare' 800GB unplugged and ready to use in the array if one of the drives fails in the future.

After first building Vista Ultimate 64-bit using the GigaByte MoBo S-Series EP45-DS4P and setting up the 3xRAIDed drives, I tried to create a RescueMedia-Boot-CD and it errored badly, throwing me right out of the application without any warning or error message at all.

I subsequently found out that I didn't give the IntelMatrixStorage software enough time (Hmmm, it took two days to wake up!) for it to do it's required pass on the RAIDed drives. After that settled, I then created the ISO for the RescueMedia-Boot-CD successfully. Moral to this point - check IntelMatrixStorage software has completed satisfactorily, particularly on RAIDed drives.

I then booted to the RescueMedia-Boot-CD, and AcronisDiskDirector10.0.2160 FAILED to detect any drives and came up with Error E000101F4: Acronis Disk Director has not found any hard disk Drives. I then booted to TrueImage12.0.9646.2 and to my surprise, all disks and their partitions looked fine.

What concerned me was that when I needed to use DiskDirector (often by itself), it must work and see all that TrueImage sees, so I went one step further and found ASZ "Acronis Secure Zone" on TrueImage, and thought I'd give that a try for a size of 50GB, and voila after another reboot, I was able to see the 'lost' drives that AcronisDiskDirector failed to pick up the first time, but was very disappointed to have to stumble upon ASZ and by fluke, give it a try. It's almost like that the creation of the ASZ should be a mandatory part of the installation sequence, optionally removing it if one decided to later on.

The other concern I had was that if I hadn't purchased and installed both products, along with the ASZ feature, by only going for AcronisDiskDirector, then I would have still been left with this error E000101F4.

Does the Acronis developers have any answer/s they can give this forum and myself to explain this dilemna, as often only one application is required.

Welcome to the forum! To understand what happened you should be aware that Acronis uses Linux as the operating system in the bootable recovery environment. Acronis Disk Director has been out for a couple of years and the available drivers probably do not include your new hardware. However, True Image Home 2009 was just released, is based on a newer Linux kernel, and has better support for modern hardware.

There are a few options available to you. First, when you create a bootable recovery CD using the Bootable Media Builder application be sure to include both "Full" and "Safe" versions of DD 10 in your build. The "full" mode version uses Linux; that's the version that gave you the "E00101F4" error because it probably didn't include RAID drivers for your new system and thus it couldn't detect any disk drives present. The "safe" mode version uses DOS and should be able to see any hardware that your BIOS recognizes, however it does not support networking and probably will not see USB devices. But for standalone partitioning the safe mode version should work fine.

Second, you could contact Acronis Support and ask them to make you a custom ISO file that includes driver support for your hardware. They will often do this. With the proper drivers then the full-mode version of DD should work fine.

Finally, you could build a BartPE or a VistaPE boot disk which will allow you to run the Windows versions of TI and DD in the bootable recovery environment. If you're up for the task this is often the best solution because you can add Windows drivers to the build yourself in the future to support new hardware.

I'm not sure why adding an Acronis Secure Zone (ASZ) did anything to the boot disk; it shouldn't have. It may have affected the environment that TI or DD will boot into when you run the Windows versions of the programs and then do an operation that requires a reboot. The programs then reboot into the Linux recovery environment from files stored on the disk (not from the recovery CD), but it is the same recovery environment that is on the recovery CD. Perhaps when you created the ASZ the program updated the recovery files to the version used by TI 2009, which apparently has proper driver support for your hardware.